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Real Americans

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Review - By William Hogeland - Sep. 20 (Opinion) - “Why don’t they just vote their interest?” Liberals keep failing to address that question. But history suggests that American populists’ rejection of liberalism is a matter of principle, not of interest.

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The Rising Tide

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Review - By Michael Mastrandrea, Stephen Schneider - Dec. 19 (Special Report) - The scientific evidence for a human fingerprint on this global warming is now overwhelming. Emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, from human activities—most crucially, the burning of fossil fuels, but also agricultural practices, deforestation, and cement production—are the primary drivers, particularly of the rapid warming since the 1970s.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

God, the Army, and PTSD

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Review - By Tara McKelvey - Nov. 11 (Special Report) - During the Iraq war, however, the great difficulty veterans experienced in getting psychiatric care—greater than before—was not a product of cost-cutting, but of conviction: many Bush administration officials believed that soldiers who supported the war would not face psychological problems, and if they did, they would find comfort in faith. In a resigned tone, one prominent researcher who worked for the VA, and asked that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, explained that high-ranking officials believed that “Jesus fixes everything.” Benimoff and the others who returned with devastating psychological injuries found a faith-based bureau within the VA. At veterans’ hospitals, chaplains were conducting spirituality assessments of patients.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 15 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Texting Toward Utopia

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Review - By Evgeny Morozov - Apr. 12 (Special Report) - The major challenge in understanding the relationship between democracy and the Internet— aside from developing good measures of democratic improvement—has been to distinguish cause and effect. That is always hard, but it is especially difficult in this case because the grandiose promise of technological determinism—the idealistic belief in the Internet’s transformative power—has often blinded even the most sober analysts.

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Land of My Dreams

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Review - By Martha Nussbaum - Mar. 27 (Opinion) - I am tempted to say, somewhat hyperbolically, that virtually the only place in today’s India where Gandhi’s ideas are being duly honored is on the campus of Jamia. But Hasan knows, like Gandhi, and like Martin Luther King, Jr., that anger will not go away, will not cease to create the possibility of violence, unless the subordination that fuels it is brought to an end.

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Free Market Myth

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Review - By Dean Baker - Feb. 19 (Opinion) - The extraordinary financial collapse of recent months has been commonly described as a testament to the failure of deregulation. The events are indeed testament to a failure—a failure of public policy. Blaming deregulation is misleading. In general, political debates over regulation have been wrongly cast as disputes over the extent of regulation, with conservatives assumed to prefer less regulation, while liberals prefer more. In fact conservatives do not necessarily desire less regulation, nor do liberals necessarily desire more. Conservatives support regulatory structures that cause income to flow upward, while liberals support regulatory structures that promote equality. “Less” regulation does not imply greater inequality, nor is the reverse true.

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A Tribe Apart

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Review - By Barnett R. Rubin - Jan. 25 (Special Report) - The Asia Society stands out from its neighbors on New York’s Park Avenue. The façade, constructed in a spirit of cross-cultural cooperation, mixes Oklahoma’s red granite with Rajasthan’s red sandstone, the stone from which the medieval emperors of Delhi, descendants of conquerors from Afghanistan and Central Asia, hewed the Red Fort of Delhi. Like traditional Persian forts, the Asia Society has both public and private audience rooms (diwan-i aam and diwan-i khas). Several times I have heard Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai speak in the public auditorium, but last September I took the elevator to a small, private room, where Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, was briefing a few colleagues.

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Changing Iran: An Interview with Akbar Ganji

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Review - Jun. 17 (Interview) - In my view, the most important achievement of the revolution is that it turned the masses into agents of historical change and highly politicized them. The 1979 revolution demanded political independence and the end of external interference in Iran's domestic affairs. In this sense Iran has become independent, but globalization processes have made possible many new forms of foreign interference that affect Iran. For example, periodically the Iranian government is forced to open its most sensitive nuclear installations, which are hidden from its own people, to inspections by Western governments. National independence in the old sense of the term does not and cannot exist anymore.

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Hamas and the end of the two-state solution

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Review - By Helena Cobban - Jun. 05 (Special Report) - In January 2006, in an election that monitors recognized as free and fair, the Islamist movement Hamas won 76 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian parliament. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had pushed hard for the elections, since she was confident her Fateh allies would win. Hamas's victory came as a complete surprise and embarrassment to both her and the Fateh leaders. Angered by the Hamas victory, Rice and Fateh decided to join with Israel in working to overturn it.

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Urban decline moves to the suburbs

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Review - By Michael Gecan - Mar. 26 (Special Report) - older cities like Chicago and counties like Cook have already shown how to focus on the few. Their economic strategies have benefited those who own the businesses that cater to the tourist trade, not the workers who make the beds and chop the onions. They have created enclaves around universities and hospitals where parents can buy condos for their student-children and where private security forces patrol the streets. They have sequestered revenues generated by business and medical clusters within those districts, thus starving the larger public housing, health, transit, and educational systems in the sprawling ghettos just outside the gates. They have encouraged construction of homes and apartment towers that few local residents can afford, which are bought as investment by European and South American elites. And they have kept control of the courts, jails, and police forces --patronage for the operatives who guarantee machine incumbency, the industry of incarceration weakly buffering the loss of the steel and auto and other manufacturing industries of the past.

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What Makes a Miracle

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Review - By Pranab Bardhan - Jan. 29 (Special Report) - While India's performance has been substantial, China's has been truly dramatic. The particularly dramatic Chinese performance (like the earlier economic "miracles" in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore) suggests, in the dominant narrative, that authoritarianism may be better than democracy for development--at least in its early stages.

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Open Letter from Akbar Ganji

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:02:11 -0700

Boston Review - By Akbar Ganji - Oct. 31 (Statement) - Iran's dangerous international situation and the consequences of Iran's dispute with the West have totally deflected the world's attention and especially the attention of the United Nations from the intolerable conditions that the Iranian regime has created for the Iranian people. The dispute over the enrichment of uranium should not make the world forget that, although the 1979 revolution of Iran was a popular revolution, it did not lead to the formation of a democratic system that protects human rights.

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Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 11:59:09 -0700

Boston Review - By Glenn C. Loury - Aug. 10 (Special Report) - According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States--with five percent of the world's population--houses 25 percent of the world's inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century. Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America's urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.3 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Reckoning - The proper place for religion in politics

Sat, 19 May 2007 11:17:18 -0700

Boston Review - By Cathy Tumber - May. 19 (Special Report) - In the morose hours of reckoning that followed George W. Bush's 2004 electoral victory, many liberals were forced to conclude that their politics had lost its moral center, costing them the confidence of a decisive margin of American voters--with deadly consequences. Regaining a moral voice in time for 2008 is a tall order. Many liberals--those most closely indebted to the classical thought of Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson--are attracted to the idea that politics neither has nor needs a moral center, that liberalism's genius lies in a scheme of political checks and balances that relegates life's sweetest rewards to the realms of religion and privacy. But even those who are comfortable with the rhetoric of public morality face troubles because of the peculiarly American fusion of morality and religion. Religion is risky territory for liberals, who generally wish to maintain a healthy respect for the legal separation of church and state and are also loath to criticize religious beliefs, though some have grown increasingly comfortable doing so.

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Days of Lies and Roses

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:36:12 -0700

Boston Review - By Sarah Chayes - Mar. 23 (Special Report) - In a context of increasing danger and violence--which reached a pitch last fall when open battles between Taliban fighters and Afghan and international troops were fought at the gates of Kandahar--the situation in this very symbolic southern capital of Afghanistan has indeed stabilized a bit. Village families that fled the fighting to camp out in the cramped homes of relatives in town have returned to their vineyards and orchards. Kandahar streets are crowded again--if somewhat tentatively--with the jolly chaos of late-model SUVs, caparisoned horse-drawn taxis, dark-green pickup trucks loaded with police officers, battered white station wagons, brightly painted rickshaws, vegetable wagons, donkey carts, dust, and smog.

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